A safe haven for wounded hearts.

Menu

Tag Archive | hopeless

You can live in hope or you can live in hopelessness. Or you can merely exist in numbness devoid of hope in any form. This was my chosen method for fifteen long years. Shutting down my emotions eased the agony of an emotionally abusive marriage. Some days I could almost forget it was there. I learned how to hide my scars and secrets. I functioned well. I did the best I could to protect my children. I didn’t know from what at the time. Just that I needed to be more than enough for them.

For me, numbness relieved some of the suffering some of the time. That is what made it a viable survival technique. However, it also reduced my ability to experience positive emotions. You cannot choose which feelings to avoid and which ones to embrace. It is all or nothing.

Unlike the day I chose numbness over hopelessness, I did not make a conscious decision to leave numbness behind in search of a hope filled life. It was my Heavenly Father that set me on that path. But before I could find hope, it was necessary for me to sink into the despair of hopelessness again. You see, God can and will reach down and pull us out of the miry pit, but He can’t do that if we are content to be stuck in the sludge. Often God will set a plan in motion that brings us to our knees in desperation where our only option is to call out to Him.

It is overwhelming and terrifying to have the bandaids pulled off your carefully concealed wounds and watch the bleeding resume all over again. The pain is just as intense the second time around. I wept. I prayed. Or more accurately, I brought the broken and shattered pieces of my heart to God. I did not ask God to mend the fragments. I did not ask God to heal my pain. I simply cried that I didn’t want to hurt anymore. That was it. No requests for love, joy, peace or hope for my future. That was an impossible prayer, a far away dream that I didn’t dare put into words able to betray me. Asking not to hurt anymore was difficult enough.

I recently read a description in Brene Brown’s book “Daring Greatly” of what vulnerability feels like. Someone described it as “A lump in my throat and a knot in my chest.” And I thought, yes, that is also what the beginning of hope feels like. When hope was first offered to me it emerged as a tiny ball in the pit of my stomach, ascended to my chest, my throat, and finally became a pressure behind my eyes that I fought to keep there. Behind my eyes. Where I could deny it and push it away again. Not betraying me by leaking down my cheeks to be seen and felt. My mind fought the possibility of hope, but my body believed and responded before the rest of me was able.

At one time or another you have been advised to listen to your body. Pay attention to its signals. Sleep when you are tired. Eat when you are hungry. Drink when you are thirsty. So, I ask, why not hope when your body is desiring the promise of healing?

Hope is challenging. Hope takes courage. But hope will not disappoint when you place it in the hands of our Abba Father, the One who will wipe every precious tear from your eyes.

Now hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. Romans 5:5

Hope is often a neatly wrapped up package extended to us, the broken and hurting, to offer encouragement and comfort. Just as I did to you in my first post on this blog. And sometimes that works. But I know all too well that hope is not always the promise of delightful butterflies, colourful rainbows, sparkling unicorns and cuddly kittens. Hope is a nice word comparable to love, faith, joy, peace. Inspiring expressions that confused and frustrated my deeply wounded soul. The very idea of hope brought me despair and pain because that is what experience taught me. Hope was useless.

I once had hope. Dreams. An expectation of a happy life. And then I got married. At age twenty, along with our four month old baby we became an instant family. Two days after the wedding, I moved 3,000 km away from my family, friends, church and all that was familiar to me. New adventures awaited us all! It didn’t take me long to discover these “adventures” were beyond the imaginings of any new bride.

We did not consummate our marriage on our wedding night. Or the night after. Even though my parents had gifted us a hotel room for the weekend and babysitting services. I had naturally expected that we would. We had not been together for several months. I was disappointed. He wasn’t. My disappointment grew in the following days, weeks, months. His didn’t. It soon became apparent to me that I was no longer desired sexually or otherwise. Therefore, I was no longer desirable or lovable. I felt helpless to improve the situation. Nothing that I said or did changed anything. During the next ten years, hope faded away until there was nothing left but despair and the immeasurable pain of a despondent, broken spirit. I was now hopeless.

A person cannot live in hopelessness forever. There will come a time when something needs to change. Ten years into my shell of a marriage, I celebrated my thirtieth birthday. I looked back at the previous decade of my life, grieved the loss of my twenties, and decided I was not able to continue living in hopelessness any longer. My marriage was destroying me. I was disappearing.

I did not choose hope. That would have hurt too much. Instead, I chose numbness. Numbness was the safest way to protect myself. Hope would have involved change and required me to open my heart to a possibility of something, of anything, of I didn’t know what, and that idea was incomprehensible and frightening to me. My shattered heart was too fragile to seek something so unknown and uncertain. A flicker of hope? I snuffed it out before it even had a chance to ignite.

You see, I understand that sometimes hope is just too hard. Hope is risky. Hope is scary. And so, when I tell you there is hope, it is because I have found it to be true.

There is surely a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off. Proverbs 23:18